


the things we leave behind

by stillmadaboutpetra



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: ://, Animal Death, Bodily Autonomy, Body Horror, Body Worship, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Grief/Mourning, Jaskier | Dandelion Loves Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, M/M, Mental Anguish, Necrophilia, Obsession, Roach is dead too, Romanticism, implied - Freeform, thats implied too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:28:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26820667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillmadaboutpetra/pseuds/stillmadaboutpetra
Summary: “Geralt!”He’s very dead.It’s wildly unacceptable of him.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 12
Kudos: 35





	the things we leave behind

**Author's Note:**

> mind the tags.
> 
> today i got myself into a mood and had this thought:
> 
> "i think the thing about jaskier fucking geralt specifically is jaskier being able to sort of....force idealism on geralts body but geralt is gone and so to press the issue of geralt having no autonomy in his own life and being perpetually fictionalized and turned into a folklore and jaskier being the crux of it?"
> 
> and then was like, fuck it. drank some whiskey, had a quick writing spurt. so sorry to my subscribers who have to see this unbidden...
> 
> "He always said i had a lovely singing voice."

* * *

Jaskier finds Geralt dead.

The day had passed and then the night and then again once more, before the bard, quite alone and feeling quite alone and quite fed up with the loneliness, sought out the witcher. There’s nothing else for it. Geralt has not returned and if the scamp thinks he’s going to make his kill and be off without doubling back - and oh Jaskier has yet to learn to make him leave something valuable behind. All his odds and ends had been packed up on Roach, ostensibly for emergencies - an out! An escape! -- Jaskier should have seen through it - it’s just not acceptable.

They’re past that now, truthfully. They should be. It’s been years. Jaskier needs to use his fingers and his toes to count the years, and then often Roach’s hooves as well - on rare days of circumspection and reverie, Geralt will allow Jaskier the pleasure of counting Geralt’s toes and fingers as well. He no longer has a finger on the left hand, a stump of a pinkie left behind when a blade fell and his gloves were not strong enough and now the flex of his left hand causes a spasm - the knuckle, hanging, begs itself into the air in remembering the rest of the digit. The tendon trembles like a long note left to fade. Oh but he has enough fingers and toes to do the mathematics of friendship shared. Years. It has been far too long.

Geralt is dead, his body being well licked by the gentle current of the stream. He lays half ashore, legs soaked and - - leg. Singular. One leg lays crooked and the other no longer constitutes the word ‘leg’ and instead is really just a femur that ends abruptly and the rest of the word, the object, that might have been ‘leg’ is long gone, either downstream and about to frighten some young girl out doing her washing or providing some sour muscled nutrition to whatever beast did the witcher in.

“Geralt!”

He’s very dead.

It’s wildly unacceptable of him.

The fifth iteration of Roach that Jaskier has had the pleasure of walking alongside lays nearby, the flesh of the body clinging to the ribs, the jaunt of hip suddenly starved looking. Jaskier turns around in the scene. There’s a blood spray across the grass and sand. The fronds swaying ever so gently boast ashen scorches from Geralt’s desperate cast of igni. But it hadn’t been enough. And the scene - it’s barely remarkable. It does not stink. There’s no true gore to it. Geralt’s guts remain intact; if they had not, Jaskier would have seen the birds descending in heathen court to ritual.

It’s only as Jaskier kneels beside Geralt, bemused by the stillness, a stillness so deep and loud that his friend is surely gone, for he would never allow his stillness to be so compelling and so noticeable, that he sees the flatness and darkness of his hair where his skull had been neatly shaved somewhere far away against a rock. That the leather around the stump of his once-leg was torn far above the dissected wound. That he’d been neatly wrenched apart, maybe before, maybe after, death had taken him by matter of cracking him apart. The monster perhaps, in the same way Jaskier did, wanted to know the Witcher, desired him in wholeness and fragments. To dig into the mind of him. But it had such a delicious ravenous hunger. It could not help cracking him apart. Some things can only be known in their breaking.

“Honestly,” Jaskier tsks. He trembles as he moves Geralt’s skull, cupping the cold pulp of his brain and blood. “Honestly, Geralt,” he chides. Geralt stares at him with lazy acceptance. Jaskier shakes his head at the witcher. “Look what you’ve done to yourself, darling.”

What will he tell the people?

“Was it horrible?” Jaskier asks Geralt, shifting to lay Geralt’s head gently on the ground once more. Jaskier wipes his hand on Geralt’s shirt but matter clings darkly to his fingers. He wipes it again and then, frustrated, gathers the gray of Geralt’s hair and bundles it around his fingers, slogging off the unavoidable detritus of death and early decay. He tucks the hair back, arranging it absently. Gathers two even tassels to lay over Geralt’s shoulders. These he neatens, setting the body straight. Tries, at least. Geralt proves as stubborn in death as he did in life, unmovable, impossible, resistant to Jaskier always. Always. Bastard.

“Was it the biggest beast you’ve ever seen, Witcher?” The swords are nowhere to be found. But the medallion lingers like a curse. Jaskier caresses the chain, dips his fingers beneath the cool silver to run his calloused pad over the links, slipping like so many tales and lies and promises, until he arrives at the heavy wolf head, as complete and as compelling as Geralt’s own skull. Silver and bones.

“Was it worth it?”

Jaskier grins at Geralt and in a dash of movement, sits astride the bulge of the witcher’s chest, made narrow now in the lack of breath. He runs his hands up Geralt’s proud arms to briefly swallow his throat and then to tilt the stiff grim line of his jaw. He cradles Geralt’s face and presses his thumbs into the never-dimpled corner of his lips to force the molded flesh into a smirk and a sneer. The flesh lies brittle. Geralt has not changed in death. He remains splendidly whole. Jaskier does not notice his own trembling.

“You’ve left it all to me once again. You’re so selfish. You’ve no sense for a good story. Where the hell are we, somewhere forgettable? Unimportant?”

Jaskier casts his eyes around the mundane scene. How the hell is this it? This is it? He looks at Geralt’s placid face. Faintly shocked. Mouth open. Jaskier thumbs his lips and peels the blue seam of his mouth open to touch the gray curl of his tongue that now chokes backwards into his throat, stone-hard. The canines of Geralt’s mouth remain gleaming. Twin talismens hung from his skull like ornaments.

“Important,” he corrects himself, settling his weight onto the respired heaviness of Geralt’s body. He’ll make it important. “Geralt. Geralt. You’re giving me such a hard time about this. All these years and this is the finale?” He pulls on the witcher’s hair then regrets it, for if he yanks it free from the root, nothing ever will grow again. The story has come to its end.

The inevitable settles over them. A bard and his once-upon-a-time witcher. Jaskier never imagined this would be it. He was supposed to die first. Geralt of Rivia, the White Wolf, was meant to live forever. Into sunset after sunset. He was supposed to sleep in the arms of his immortal sorceress. The world was supposed to turn beneath his heavy and strange foot for all the years that the earth would cling to itself and the sky roam and pass in sun and star. Kingdoms should have rotted to dust before Geralt of Rivia fell.

“Geralt,” Jaskier admonishes again, touching the Witcher freely, as Geralt never allowed him before. Gone are the companionable brushes of hand and shoulder. The sturdy grip on drunken nights. Jaskier presumes over him, knees cinched tight on either side of him, hands gluttonous on his sculpted face.

“You won’t even hear me sing about your death. Oh, you idiot. You never listened to me well enough. Played deaf to me. You never -- we never,” Jaskier closes his mouth with a click, baring his teeth at the Witcher, gnashing with cool clamouring hunger as sure as any midnight creature.

Bless these gifts. Blessed to eat. Witchers dead become our meat.

Geralt. Too many potions deep, spitting and shitting blood. Sweating and moaning and becoming death, Jaskier wiping him over and over as his friend clawed himself in and out of the grave of his own body. Jaskier had entertained himself for hours singing to Geralt suspected lines of his final hours.

The witcher went with a jingly clamour  
For the carriage of death called ever sweeter  
And the fever took you naked from your amour  
For the witcher dead became just a man  
Whom i might one day see in holy lands

Geralt never remembered. He never had an opinion on his final verses. He wouldn’t now.

“Lovely. It’ll be lovely. It’ll be unforgettable.”

No one will take Geralt of Rivia from him. He might have passed from this world unseen from Jaskier’s eyes, but now it would be he and he alone to memorize and memorialize him. Perhaps this, yes this, was the sweeter end. This was the finale, played carefully to a close. Jaskier and Jaskier only, ever him only, only him, who could hold Geralt so sweetly and closely, with red and black dressed around them and the water washing Geralt clean.

Yes. Yes. Geralt is blistered with clean. He is sun warm now, white and shining. Oh yes. How the Witcher fell, sword bright and harken in the air. He dealt the final blow, and with the noble surrender of life, he fell, so gently to the cradle of the world, to the rushing cradle of Jaskier’s arms. The blood was the burden of rubies and royalty. His brow glowed without a crown. His wolf howled himself to an eternal slumber. All champions fall. Gloriously. Courageously. And the nymph, why, she was the greatest beauty of the ages. Her eyes innocent, her face fair, her body soft with untouched girlishness. And Other for an Other. The nymph cried tears of pearl and grew lilies and lotus over the Witcher. He died not for love but for the holiness of beauty, for the untouched, for the innocent sacredness of-

Jaskier dizzies himself with his imagination. “Yes,” he hisses to Geralt, gripping him gleefully. “Yes, you marvelous man. Gods, you’re a god, you know what? You’re a god, Geralt.”

As ever, Geralt ignores him. He never has the words for flattery, not to give it nor to accept it. He never accepts Jaskier. But he cannot resist. Not now. Jaskier rests their foreheads together, repeating the praise. “God. You’re a god. You’re a god, Geralt. You’re among the gods.”

To the god fearing and humble, a witcher is sacrilege. A stolen thing of imitation and dirt. A clabbered and monstrous grotesque improvisation. Teeth. Teeth. They gave him new teeth, like a nightmare and a dog. Jaskier laughs and presses his lips to Geralt’s to slip his tongue into the cold cavern of his mouth and drag his tongue along the bone of the Witcher’s teeth. It might have hummed, the stroke of them together. It might have sung.

Once, Yennefer called him a vulture. Jaskier. A beady black eyed carrion creature. Geralt had laughed. Jaskier had ruffled up with the words and denied it but now - he thinks of the dark sorceress with relish and longing. Is this not his feast? Is this not his highest dearest claim and crime. Where is she now? He, he alone, is here to worship the body. Would he share? Would she elbow him aside to meet him kneeling knee to knee like children crammed in prayer?

He will share Geralt with the world. Morsel by morsel. Jaskier kisses him deeply, holding him by the dark of his clothes, knotting Geralt tighter to him. Let his final mortal days be this: Geralt in his mouth, Geralt upon his lips forever. Geralt on his tongue until it wags no more and passes like bread to another, given charitably, grandly, to every hungry mouth of the world. The great legend of the White Wolf made up in word.

Jaskier pants, kissing his tears into Geralt’s cheeks, weeping imitation onto the Witcher’s face as it could never weep.

Would he share?

He and he alone are here to kiss the body, to love the body. Geralt is no more and yet - Jaskier holds him precious and close. They will not take Geralt from him. They never could. Not all the years, not all the war. Not all the fear and perversion that clouds the common mind. He made this. He made the White Wolf. He will lay him to the earth by handfuls.

Jaskier sits back from the kiss, shaking with it, and fumbles at the medallion. The spine of the wolf’s mane bites into his palm when he grips it and Jaskier coos to the snarling face of the animal. Yennefer will want this. He will warm it for her. He will present the crow his vulture’s reward. She will stroke it as she stroked the Witcher.

Jasker strokes him. He pets the wolf and pets his Wolf and touches his wet face to Geralt’s wet face, wet with him. All their years. All their years. Fingers and toes.

“I love you.” He kisses Geralt, sighs his song into his unresisting mouth. He urges his hips to unresisting hips. “They will love you too. They’ll admit it to themselves.”

In their beds, alone, they will think of him. Geralt, the last great creation of the world. After this, all the unremarkable.

Jaskier slides against Geralt’s body, embracing him passionately. The water creeps up his boots to his pants, to tangle its caress with him as it does with Geralt, until the water may take them both and their lovemaking to the far ends of the world, to pass from droplet to droplet into the unending sea. They will foam and gather with clouds and rain again anew and bed themselves to soil to bloom. Jaskier loves him desperately. He loves him nakedly. He slips from his clothes and shivers atop him, rigid like death, aching like death, going red in the throes of death; it is pleasure.

Geralt, in his resistance, welcomes him as he never has before. Jaskier holds them close and promises him eternity. He has not yet died and so Geralt shall live forever like this. He will make it so. And when Jaskier gushes like a wound that will not end, he eases the promise like a kiss between Geralt’s lips, for the natural order of the world to swallow it for him, to be taken to the blank belly of the Witcher, to be held in the chemical chamber of his slow unbecoming. It is impossible for a thing to unforge and yet, was Geralt not all impossibilities imbued.

A grave. A pyre. There’s much to be done. A song to be written. The world will weep. A song to be sung. Jaskier weeps and forces Geralt to weep too, cheek to cheek as never before and never again.


End file.
